Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture

Professor Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State University has an online opinion piece at US News and World Report. The topic? A response and rebuttal of various slurs against Pennock made in that venue by Discovery Institute spokesperson Casey Luskin, plus some very pertinent remarks about the unseemly and violent rhetoric being deployed by the religious antievolution movement.

The following essay was written in response to a Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture critique of the PBS Evolution series back around 2000. The DI somehow thought that number of Nobel prizes awarded to any citizen, native or naturalized, in the USA speaks as an endorsement of K-12 education available in the post-Scopes trial period. Various erroneous claims of the DI are punctured.

In 1999, the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture put together a brief fund-raising document outlining their purpose and plans in general terms for the following twenty years. They used a third-party copying center for duplication, and the person who was actually tasked with copying the document thought it looked of interest, and with a friend released the text to the Internet.

I have hosted the OCR of the text here, complete with original OCR errors, since that time. I'm pleased to be able to offer a PDF version now.

RSS Syndication

Antievolutionists Say the Darndest Things

Antievolutionists often express outrage over alleged incivility from those who oppose their efforts to evade the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But they have no difficulty in dishing out the abuse themselves. Here is a sample from the Invidious Comparisons thread that documents egregious behavior on the part of the religious antievolution advocates.

IDC advocate Jonathan Wells:

These critics include embryologists, paleontologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, philosophers, and even lawyers. Unfortunately, the North American science-and-religion establishment has largely turned a deaf ear to these critics, preferring instead to abandon classical theology and embrace metaphysical materialism and moral relativism. But I see the situation as analogous to the last years of Soviet communism. A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon, to the surprise of many people in academia and the media, the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did in 1990.